Robert McNeil: Lemonheads there may be, we're not all fruitcakes

Published on Monday 17 August 2009 22:57

UNTIL yesterday, if you'd spoken to me about the Lemonheads, I'd have assumed you were talking about a pop group and, ever the eager bluffer, would have cobbled together pithy remarks about their tight sound and compelling beat. How I would have been rumbled! For the Lemonheads are not a funky four-piece but a new species of alien from ooter space. Tschh, I should have known that.

Their existence has been acknowledged – I'm playing with words here; do keep a sceptical eyebrow raised – in files released by that Ministry of Defence. These files record UFO sightings reported between 1980 and 1996. Wait a minute, what about the more recent ones? What's the point of giving us all this rot about Lemonheids, when there might have been much worse in the last 13 years? What if the Kumquat People are up there waiting to kick us in the sublunary spheres?

So typical of the British Establishment: we'll tell the plebs all this potentially Earth-shattering stuff 29 years later. It's called a free society. You wouldn't understand. If we'd known there were Lemonheids leering in from the void, we could have got supplies in. Maybe not fruit, in case they took it personally, but some biscuits at least, and perchance a couple of pies.

Curiously enough, the fruit theme continued when top brass warned the then defence secretary, Michael O'Heseltine, that the "Rendlesham Incident", in which US airmen in Suffolk reported a UFO, could become a political "banana skin".

Between 1980 and 1996, around 800 close encounters took place or, to be fair, did not take place. Most were recorded between 1995 and 1996, when The X-Files was on the telly. Previously, the busiest year for cosmic capers had been 1978, the year that Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released.

But all this scepticism is irritating. None of us wants to face up to the awful truth that ooter space is just one big black hole. We don't want nowt in the nebulae. We want morally and technologically advanced beings to save us from ourselves. We envisage laying down a red carpet, and getting ready to welcome them with open arms, only to gasp in disappointment as the steel door hisses open and ghastly, scowling beings come into view, wearing Rangers scarves and waving Union Flags.

Let's face it, creatures from other civilisations who think Bonnybridge is the capital of Earth can't be all that bright. But still we stare skywards in hope. While undertaking intensive research – pressing a few buttons on my computer – for this monograph or causerie, I cannot deny that I experienced a little frisson on looking at photies and videos of strange things scooting aboot the void, ken?

Here could be the kind of fear that helps unify mankind. For the aforementioned Lemonheids, to take just one example, didn't sound awfully nice. One of them appeared out of a heat-emitting spaceship in a field and said to two young boys: "We want you. Come with us." Mind you, if they came before our courts for beckoning to wee boys, saying "Come with us", they'd probably get an hour's community service. Pity them, though, if they refused to pay a parking fine for landing their spacecraft on a yellow line: "Take them away and destroy them!"

Despite such incidents, the general consensus, alas, is that UFOs are just so much moonshine. Even the Rendlesham Incident was explained away years later, when a serviceman admitted he and his mates had shone lights through the trees and made weird noises through a loudspeaker.

It could well be that the only meaningful Falkirk Triangle is the one between the chip-shop, the off-licence and Lidl. But somewhere out there, surely, something must exist. It can't just be us. We're awful.

Yet more lunacy in block and white

PUNTERS sighed in resignation on hearing that Citizens Advice had banned the word "blacklisting" and substituted it with "blocklisting". It was thought "blacklisting" might have racial connotations.

As I sat in my back garden, listening to the blockbird chirping his morning song, I recalled similar loony instances of political correctness that one inevitably encounters as a journo.

Once, on my local paper, I wrote in a column about an irritating man who woke me at six every morning by scraping his screeching street-cleaning machine right up against the walls of ma hoose. Later, a pal in the cooncil trade union informed me they'd thought of bringing a complaint of racism because I'd described the fellow as "black-bearded". That he was a peelie-wallie white man was neither here nor, arguably, there.

Another time, I wrote that something looked like it had been trampled by a troop of baboons. I was then informed that those behind the alleged trampling included someone of mixed-race, at whom they felt the term "baboon" might have been aimed. No kidding. It's difficult to deal with imbecility of such depths.

Curiously, the Campaign Against Political Correctness described the blocklisting palaver, not as "political correctness gone mad" but as "political correctness gone over the top". It's now politically incorrect to speak of "political correctness gone mad". And rightly so.

Political correctness is a difficult subject. Much depends on context. In Scotland, you can detect the mass intake of breath if you even mention "the English". Throughout Britain, you dare not mention "Islam", unless in praiseworthy terms, and certainly not in the context of nutters and so forth.

In Britain, a strong instinct to censor has been fostered by reactionary liberals. Consequently, the sensible thing would be to ban liberals in the name of freedom. In so doing, we must not let a small thing like sensitivity to paradox deter us.